The Phi Beta Kappa Society has named Professor Margo Schlanger as one of 14 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars for the 2025–2026 academic year.
Each year, members of the Committee on the Visiting Scholar Program select top scholars in the liberal arts and sciences to visit universities and colleges where Phi Beta Kappa chapters are located. Visiting scholars spend two days on each campus meeting informally with undergraduates, participating in classroom lectures and seminars, and giving one major lecture open to the academic community and general public.
Schlanger is the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. She began her career at the US Department of Justice and served in the Obama and Biden administrations.
As a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar, she will speak on topics that draw from her teaching, scholarship, and government service.
Her public lecture topics will include solitary confinement, disability and equality in American prisons, and how to institutionalize “doing the right thing” in government agencies.
Her classroom lessons will explore how gender-conscious standards can free or constrain women, civil rights in the Trump administration, and the relationship between criminal justice reform and abolitionist movements such as defunding the police.
“The topics I proposed are areas where I have both experience and deep commitments, so I feel I have something to offer that is not just what you’d learn by a simple google search, that is not hyper-technical, and that could engage an audience,” Schlanger said.
Schlanger is an authority on civil rights issues and civil and criminal detention. She joined the Law School faculty in fall 2009 and teaches about constitutional law, torts, and civil rights, including classes related to jails and prisons. She also founded and runs the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, the preeminent source for bringing together and analyzing civil rights cases from across the United States.
For Schlanger, who is used to teaching law students over the course of a semester, the relatively brief encounters with undergraduate students and the general public provide her the opportunity to think about and showcase her work in a new way.
“For each of my topics, I want my audience to learn more than just a bottom line; I want them to understand some of the tradeoffs and implications of the topics. I’m really looking forward to talking to undergraduates and faculty around the country.”
The 2025–2026 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars will make more than 100 visits during the academic year, with the majority of them also participating in the podcast Key Conversations with Phi Beta Kappa.
